Lotto winner Bob Erb has always shared — now he just has a lot more to give (with video)

Erb bought his winning ticket at the New Hazelton Chevron, then gave Tamara Murrell and her co-workers $10,000 cheques. Dean Paranich, who sold him the winner, received $20,000.Mike Hager
/ Vancouver Sun

Janette and Michael Searle, with the $10,000 cheque they received from next-door neighbour Bob Erb.Mike Hager
/ Vancouver Sun

TERRACE — Bob Erb peers out from his half-open front door, wearing a paint-speckled maroon shirt emblazoned with a large cannabis leaf.

One of his daughter Audrey’s three small children screams from inside the duplex, which is surrounded by a yard filled with rusted folk art, children’s toys and a yapping miniature poodle.

Erb’s duplex unit is identified by an A scrawled in jiffy marker on the front door. Above it is a sign — “Smile, you are on Candid Camera” — possibly scooped up during Erb’s frequent garage-sale rummaging.

Since the 60-year-old won half of a $50-million Lotto Max jackpot a few weeks ago, he and his only surviving child have been slowly and quietly dispersing gifts, helping the businesses and people of Terrace, a small town hard hit by a decade-long slump in the province’s forestry industry which only now shows signs of reversing.

A fistful of cash, a $1,000 cheque here, a $10,000 cheque there. Several new high-end cars and trucks, with the stipulation that recipients give their current vehicle to someone else. The waves of generosity continue to ripple through town.

On this day, Erb speaks for five minutes before slowly and apologetically closing his door.

Gentle and unassuming, he is visibly fatigued from the media attention and the deluge of house calls from well-wishers and new “friends.”

A day later, he politely deflects an interview request, but then relents, briefly recounting the latest of a series of actions that have kept the town of 11,500 talking ever since his Nov. 2 win. Uptown one morning, he read that somebody had set off a fire extinguisher in the local gymnastics club, ruining its foam landing pads.

So, “on my way home I went and cut them a $5,000 cheque,” he says in his soft baritone, his eyes twinkling behind his large shaded spectacles. “I don’t do this (type of philanthropy normally), but their need was great and my kids all were in sports.

“Nice talking to you. Goodbye.”

Long before his lottery win made him famous, the man who spent — and promises to keep spending — his summers working as a brick and concrete tradesman was well known in Terrace for other things.

In the 2001 provincial election, he was a candidate for the B.C. Marijuana Party, running a campaign that focused on legalizing and decriminalizing marijuana. During the election, he gave out free joints along the campaign trail.

His generosity wasn’t restricted to marijuana. Over the years, Erb has been known to drop off doughnuts or flowers to local businesses and give friends antiques and collectibles he has found at garage sales. “I’ve done it all my life,” Erb says. “I’m just able to give more (now), but I’ve always spread my meagre offerings.”

As he doles out much more substantial gifts, townspeople echo a common refrain: Bob Erb is what he is.

He has hand-delivered $1,000 or $10,000 “Merry Christmas” cheques to at least 14 small businesses, deciding what they receive based on their number of employees.

While Erb is reluctant to discuss his philanthropy, others in this modest town are happy to chat about how the $10,000 cheques are helping pay down mortgages, write off debt, finance kids’ braces and even indulge in some Christmas spirit.

Janette and Michael Searle stare out at their two pet goats munching in their snowy yard and beam as they talk about the $10,000 gift from their next-door neighbour. The Searles were always friendly with Erb; Michael and Erb would commiserate last winter as they blew the snow off their respective driveways before sunrise.

Still, Michael was surprised when Erb dropped by several Saturdays ago and asked him to fill out a cheque as Searle was putting the kettle on for morning tea.

“I couldn’t even focus, I had trouble writing my name and figuring out where to put the name and number,” Searle said. “By the time the water was done boiling, he was on his way out. I shook his hand and said ‘thank you’ and he said, ‘Merry Christmas.’"

The money will help finish a downstairs bathroom, which will complete a day-care centre they hope to start in their basement. “I think it’s given a lot of hope to a lot of people and it’s really inspiring,” Searle said.

With a big grin, soft-spoken produce clerk Horace Lincoln recalls how his former Safeway co-worker Audrey Erb recently handed him $2,000 for being a “hard worker.” Lincoln just began renting a new apartment and will use the money to pay off the security deposit.

A few blocks from Erb’s house, Tony Bourgoin’s pizza joint and convenience store received $500. The boisterous Quebecer, who started the business with his wife in October 2010, said some of the money has already been used to help locals short on their grocery bill. “Helping people out like he would have wanted us to,” Tony says.

Erb plans to set up a charitable foundation in the coming weeks to begin doling out $2 million to non-profit groups that help the suffering people of Terrace. He’s also clear about who won’t be getting his cash — neither international aid organizations nor the SPCA will benefit from his generosity.

“My heart goes out to the Africans, the Asians and the homeless animals, but Africa and Asia and the animals aren’t getting any of my money,” Erb said. He said there may be an overflow “to the (Prince) Rupert and Kitimat soup kitchens, but 100 per cent of the charitable donations are staying within Terrace.”

Lest people think the well will soon run dry, Erb said he immediately tucked away $15 million into investments.

“I spent the first day and a half with bankers, lawyers and accountants,” he says, recalling the onerous task with a sigh.

“Then I phoned 70 or 80 people up … I let them know to start making arrangements. I wanted to do the giveaway in an orderly fashion – fast and over a 10-day period.”

Erb won’t say how much he has given to family and friends over the past few weeks, but said both his daughter and a close friend instantly became millionaires.

About two weeks after the big announcement, Bob’s brother Bill arrived for a brief visit at the request of his younger brother.

Bill, a retired oil driller who has been comfortably entrenched in the Dominican Republic for the past eight years, wouldn’t say whether he was expecting any huge sum of money from Bob. (“You don’t look a gift horse in the mouth, do you?”)

As for his younger brother’s good fortune, Bill notes: “he also lost before too — 43 years of buying tickets, that’s a lot of money.”Growing up in Tommy Douglas’s hometown of Weyburn, Sask., Bill says Bob was always generous to his three siblings.Bob was “good for sharing all the time,” and “thought everybody should be equal,” he says. But he was by no means their parents’ favourite child. “They hated us all equal,” Bill says wryly.

Bob’s good luck follows a sad period of his life, when a series of events related to substance abuse ripped apart his family.

In the summer of 2006, his only son, Robert Joseph Erb, then 24, was charged with producing and trafficking nearly $2 million of marijuana near Okotoks, Alta., according to the Okotoks Western Wheel newspaper.

Two summers later, BJ, as he was known, was arrested in Terrace and charged with robbery. While out on bail, he died of a drug overdose. He was never convicted.

Fifteen years before his son died, Erb separated from his wife, who had battled a cocaine addiction, and started raising the kids on his own, according to court documents. His wife died in 1998, five years after the separation.

Now that he has the money, Erb wants to tackle marijuana legalization head-on and has said he will spend about a million dollars on his campaign. He backs the federal NDP because of its enduring support for legalization.

Bob Erb hopes to fly a host of academics and advocates up to Terrace for a legalization conference in January.

Shortly before his win, Erb met briefly with well-known pot activist Dana Larsen, who was touring the north of the province to promote his Sensible BC campaign (http://www.sensiblebc.ca/).

“There’s a lot of other activist groups up there that could use the funding as well, but I think the Sensible BC campaign is the way we’re going to get the law changed,” says Larsen, who ran unsuccessfully for the leadership of the provincial NDP.

Bill says he and his brother have always smoked marijuana, but they were never hippies and Bob “always worked and did what he did.”

“From what I understand, more people die from smoking cigarettes than they do from smoking pot,” Bill says. “Why should one be illegal and one be legal?”

Even the people who sold Erb the ticket that landed him his fortune benefited.

Dean Paranich, who has been running the New Hazelton Chevron franchise for 13 years, said when he realized he had sold the winning ticket, “I felt pretty damn good for a while, but then reality sunk in and, you know what? I’m just the guy that sold the ticket, what do I get out of it?”

Turns out $20,000 and $10,000 for each of his six employees when Erb returned several weeks later to hand-deliver the cheques.

“Minimum wage thankfully went up over the last little bit — it’s now $10.25 an hour — but, considering that most of my employees are making minimum wage, $10,000 as far as a percentage of their salary for a year is a hell of a lot,” said a beaming Paranich. “That money’s going to go to a lot of good things.”

As for Erb, he says he has no plans to leave northern B.C. and he wants to keep giving to the same community that has supported him through a life filled with highs and lows.

“I like Terrace,” Erb says emphatically. “Hey, I’ve lived here for 43 years, not because I had to, but because I like the territory and the people.”

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